Bruce Fein

A new Pew Research Center Survey shows that fear of armed conflict is rampant in Asia. 93 percent of Filipino respondents are concerned about an outbreak of hostilities. 85 percent of Japanese, 84 percent of Vietnamese, 83 percent of South Koreans and 62 percent of Chinese are similarly anxious.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has predictably flunked his class in Senator Rand Paul’s foreign policy of aggressive self-defense. He scored a zero on his July 11, 2014 opinion column in the Washington Post titled “Isolationist policies make the threat of terrorism even greater,” replete with mischaracterizations or distortions of Senator Paul’s foreign policy.

The United States should not panic if Russian President Vladimir Putin attempts to annex or occupy Ukraine. Just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire and the Cold War, Russian aggression against Ukraine today would diminish its threat to the United States and cripple if not destroy President Putin’s rule. To paraphrase from Talleyrand’s condemnation of Napoleon’s murder of the Duc d’Enghien, “It would be worse than a crime, it would be a blunder.”

If Mark Twain were alive, he would sermonize that there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and Jennifer Rubin’s tirades against Senator Rand Paul’s foreign policy. Ms. Rubin’s latest unschooled and biased polemic appeared as a Washington Postblog post last week. She embarrasses the cerebral faculties like Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium.

Benign motives are suspect. They intellectually disarm, when they should trigger heightened scrutiny. As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis elaborated in Olmstead v. United States (1928): “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent … The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

To borrow from the British sage Samuel Johnson, Andrew McCarthy expounding on the Fourth Amendment is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.

The execrable ancestor of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Frederick Douglass protested, “Under this [Fugitive Slave] law the oaths of any two villains (the capturer and the claimant) are sufficient to confine a free man to slavery for life.” Under the NDAA, the suspicion of the president is sufficient to confine an American citizen to military detention for life without accusation or trial. The twin laws make for an alarming tale.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich champions presidential tyranny, not constitutional government enforced by judicial review. He would have sided with King George III against the Founding Fathers on making judges dependent on his will alone. In the Oval Office, Gingrich would coronate himself emperor like Napoleon, and scorn subordinating the presidency to the rule of law. If you adore Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, you would love a President Gingrich.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s proposed FY 2013 budget, which was released on Monday, slashes federal government extravagance by more than $1 trillion. The budget honors the vision of limited government and individual liberty enshrined by the Founding Fathers in the United States Constitution. As Thomas Jefferson lectured in his First Inaugural Address: “Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

The defense of an annual $1.2 trillion bloated national security budget mounted by Jamie Fly and Robert Zarate (9/29/11) was reminiscent of a dog walking on its hind legs. It was not done well; but it was surprising to see it done at all.

With the same confidence President Bush had in Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Jamie Weinstein has asserted that the nation’s bloated defense budget is not fueling the deficit crisis. With similar confidence, Weinstein also seems to believe that Ron Paul’s foreign policy arguments are “fallacious.”